Sunday, September 29, 2013

Lizana’s
palace was even finer than Prince Ephraim’s own. The furniture was made of
perfect white ivory and decorated with intricate carvings of various scenes; the
back of a chair depicted a peacock by a lake filled with lotus blossoms, a
table featured a maiden sunning herself under a willow tree, and a desk featured
an image of an orchard full of white-blossomed trees. The walls were lined with
silken tapestries and the floors boasted soft plush carpets and velvet rugs.
There was a curious absence of courtiers, pages, servants, or waiting ladies.

“Where are your servants?” asked the
prince. “Where is your court? Is it only you here?”

Lizana nodded. “Yes. This palace is
mine and mine alone.”

“Can you truly call yourself a queen
without a court?” the prince ventured to ask.

The queen did not answer him, but the
way she tensed up told him how he had offended her. “My apologies,” said the
prince, and he remained silent.

They reached the queen’s bed
chamber, where she set him down on the silk bedspread. “Show me your wound,”
she said.

The prince turned his back to her.
She lifted his tunic, and he felt her gently work the stinger out of his skin.
She rubbed some sort of cooling ointment over the wound that dulled the pain.
It was a soothing process, yet he felt very uncomfortable. He didn’t pay much
mind to the cold, stinging liquid she administered next; he didn’t think he
could feel any worse than he already did, no matter what kind of pain he was
in.

Finally, she pricked him with a
syringe and held it there for about a minute before working it out. “It is done,”
she told him. “The remedy has been administered.”

“Thank you kindly, Queen Lizana,”
said Prince Ephraim, turning around to bow to her. He got off the bed and waved
to her as he headed for the door.

The queen caught him by both arms.
“I did not tell you that you may leave,” she said.

“You told me that I may return home
after I told you that I loved you and you gave me the remedy,” the prince
reminded her.

“But if you love me,” said Lizana,
“then why would you ever want to leave me?”

The prince felt his stomach tighten
up. “Queen Lizana,” he ventured to say, “did you not give me permission to
return home?”

“Yes, I have given you permission,”
said the queen, “but you also told me you loved me, and said you meant it. If
you really loved me, and if you really meant it, then you would not want to
leave me. Otherwise, I cannot help but feel that you have told me a falsehood.”

“You said you were willing to let me
go my own way!” cried Prince Ephraim, though he knew how futile it was. It had all
been a trick and a test all along, and the prince’s anger and fear mixed with
his shame for having fallen for it.

The desert queen began to pull him
back to the bed. He struggled against her and tried to break free, even kicking
at her, but she caught him around the throat and said, “Behave now, or you may
find yourself receiving another sting. And this time, there will be no remedy!” Her voice was like that of a desert snake.

Sunday, September 22, 2013

“I
cannot accept your love,” said the prince, “for doing so means betraying my
own. If I must die to stay loyal to my betrothed, then that is what I am going
to do.”

“You are a fool,” Lizana said. “You
will have a chance to see your betrothed again if you do as I say. I love you,
and because I love you I am willing to let you go your own way. But this is
only if you are willing to accept my feelings for you. If you do not accept,
the venom from the sting will take hold, and you will die. Your betrothed will
mourn you. Is that what you wish?”

“Oh, no,” said the prince, “that is
not what I wish at all! I will accept your feelings for me if it means you will
set me free!”

“Very well,” Lizana said. “First,
you must tell me that you love me and that you accept my love for you.”

The prince said, “I, Prince Ephraim, accept the love of Lizana the Desert
Queen, and I fully return the feelings she has for me.”

Of
course I don’t mean it, the prince thought, to set his mind at peace. I could never say those words to any other
than my love, the beautiful Princess Clara of Alingrad. But if I am ever to see
her again, I must make sure the desert queen does not know that! “I do,” he
told Lizana. “I mean every word of it.”

“Then kiss me,” said the desert
queen.

Prince Ephraim began to feel sick to
his stomach. “But, my lady…”

“Don’t you call me ‘my lady.’ Call
me ‘my love.’”

“My…my love,” the prince stammered,
“we have already shared a kiss. Is that not enough?”

“It is not enough,” said Lizana. “I
kissed you then. I want you to kiss me.”

This
isn’t right, thought the prince. This
isn’t right at all. But if I were to die, what would become of my princess? Shakily,
he reached for the queen’s shoulders. He touched one shoulder, then the other.
He began to pull her in. Her eyes were glistening like the gems in the moat
around the shimmering white palace, and he could see the anticipation in them.
He had to think about his hands to stop them from shaking. He had to think
about each of his actions or else he’d never be able to do it…Pull her in, lean in close, press your lips
to hers…

He kissed her, and was left with the taste
of the cinnabar-colored makeup on her lips.

The queen pulled back and stared
into his eyes for a few moments before she said, “Would you like the remedy
now?”

“I would, if you please,” said
Prince Ephraim. “The sting grows more and more painful by the minute, and I
think I can feel the venom setting in—it is making me feel quite tired and
nauseous!”

“Come with me to my palace,” said
the queen, “and I will give you the remedy. But you must let me hold your hand
while we walk.”

“Very well,” said Prince Ephraim. He
held out his hand for her, and she took it. Her hand was so warm that it kept
his own from shaking, though the rest of his body trembled until he thought it
might fly apart before they reached the palace.

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

The
Rose Dragon lived wherever vegetation was plentiful. She had no permanent
settlement; for one month she may live in an open meadow full of asters, for
the next she could be found in a field of mayflowers, and sometimes she would
even take shelter in the garden of someone’s home; these occasions were few and
far between. It was on one of these rare occasions, when the Rose Dragon was
nesting in the garden of a pretty white cottage, that she formed a close
friendship with a little girl named Aliss.

Aliss was the sole caretaker of this
garden; though it had been planted by her father a while back, he was a busy
man who didn’t have much time to tend to it, and it didn’t take long for him to
grow tired of it. Her mother worked in a doctor’s office, and was too busy
taking care of people to bother caring for flowers. But Aliss had all the time
in the world for flowers. She loved them like she loved close friends. Every
day just before school and just after school, Aliss would go out to the garden
and tend to the flowers. After giving them their meal of water and fertilizer,
she would spend extra time with them. She had a little table and chair that she
set out in the center of the garden, and here she would sit and enjoy the
company of the flowers until she was called away to one of her other
commitments.

The Rose Dragon was distrustful of
humans. She thought they were too loud, too wild, too prideful, and too
irresponsible with nature to take any liking to them. Whenever she took shelter
in a person’s garden, she would change her appearance to blend in with the
surrounding vegetation. She would be mistaken for a tree or a patch of flowers
and never discovered at all, until she moved off to another settlement. But in
Aliss’ garden, she was discovered for the first time.

The Rose Dragon had taken a peculiar
interest in Aliss, who was so gentle and so good to the flowers in the garden.
Every morning and afternoon when she came out to tend to the flowers, the Rose
Dragon couldn’t help but watch her as she kissed the flowers hello and engaged
in cheerful one-sided conversation with them as she gave them their water. She
did not match the Rose Dragon’s observations of other humans at all. Other
children Aliss’ age were often very rough with flowers; they would yank them
from the stalks or pick off their petals or even pull them from the ground. The
Rose Dragon disliked children most of all for this reason.

She could not dislike the one child she
knew who was kind to flowers. But she couldn’t entirely trust Aliss either—after
all, she could harbor any other shameful qualities that humans possessed. She
would spend her mornings and afternoons observing Aliss carefully, keeping one
eye open and hoping that it would be mistaken for a sunflower or a black-eyed
Susan. But when Aliss saw the dragon’s eye, gleaming and watching her intently,
she let out a cry.

Immediately, the dragon abandoned her
camouflage and rose to her full height. She spread out her wings, which looked
like the petals of two giant roses, and she tilted her large, leafy head down
to look right into the little girl’s eyes. Her bright green scales gleamed in
the sun, and her fangs were bared. Aliss beheld this imposing sight in silent
awe, then she finally stammered, “You’re…you’re beautiful.”

“I am as beautiful as I am dangerous
to those who wish to harm me,” said the Rose Dragon. “I suggest you be very
careful, child, for I have taken a bit of a liking to you. It is rare that I
take a liking to a human, and ever rarer that I do so for a child. I advise you
not to do anything that might change my mind.”

“Harm you?” said Aliss. “I think
you’re lovely, and I would never harm a lovely thing.”

“You don’t think I’m so lovely that
you might want to pick at my petals or pry off one of my scales, do you?” asked
the Rose Dragon.

“Of course not,” said Aliss, shaking
her head.

The dragon softened. She had been
right that this was not a typical careless, wild human child. She hid her fangs
and allowed herself to look a bit more gentle and sociable. “Then we can be
friends,” she told Aliss. “But if we are going to be friends, you must ensure
that no harm will come to me while I am here.”

“Who would harm you?” Aliss asked.

“What would your parents do if they
saw a dragon in their garden?”

“They would be very surprised,”
Aliss said. “And they might ask me how the dragon got here. But they wouldn’t
harm you if they knew that you were so nice.”

The dragon shook her head slowly. “I
don’t think we should take the risk of surprising them,” she told Aliss. “I
think you need to let them know that I will be staying here for a while, and
that we are friends.”

“I can tell them that,” said Aliss.
“But they aren’t home right now.”

The Rose Dragon gently laid her head
on the girl’s shoulder. “Will you promise to tell them as soon as they return
home, then?” she asked. “Yes,” said Aliss. I can do that.

Sunday, September 8, 2013

The
prince pushed the woman off of him and staggered backwards. For a moment, he
struggled to regain his senses; the woman was looking at him, and her lips had
curled into a satisfied smile, and her topaz-colored hair was tossed back over
her shoulders. Her eyes asked, “Well? Aren’t you going to say anything?” The
prince fought in his head for what to say. Finally, at a loss for anything
else, he just said, “Why?”

The woman laughed—a deep, rolling,
throaty sound that resembled a growl more than a laugh. The prince felt that
she was mocking her. He had to say something more. “Why did you do it?” he
asked. “Why did you kiss me like…like that?”

“Because I love you,” the woman
answered.

To the prince, everything began to
feel like a mirage again, or perhaps a dream. Nothing about it seemed real, and
he wondered if perhaps he had somehow fainted in the forest while he was
chasing the peahen. Maybe he had run into a tree branch and was knocked out. He
couldn’t remember running into anything, but there was certainly a possibility.
Or else it was an effect of the venom from whatever had bitten him. The prince
held his head in his hands and shook back and forth, muttering to himself,
“This isn’t real. This isn’t real.”

The woman sat down beside him,
slipped her hand under his chin, and pulled his head up so that he looked right
at her. He thought she was going to kiss him again, and tried to pull backwards,
but she grabbed him with her other arm and pulled him close to her. Before she
could do anything, he asked abruptly, “Who are you?”

Instead of kissing him again, the
woman placed her other hand on his cheek. “I am Lizana, the desert queen,” she
told him.

“It is a lovely name,” said the
prince. He tried to remove her hand from his cheek, but she held it there like
a vice. “So this is your desert?” he asked.

“Indeed it is,” she replied.

“And you love me?”

“I dearly love you.”

“You are a divinely beautiful lady,”
the prince told her, and he meant what he said. “But we do not know eachother.
Until today, I have not laid eyes on you, and I am certain that you could say
the same about me. How could you love me?”

“I have laid eyes on you,” Lizana
said, “many times.”

“Have you? Well, why do I not
remember this?”

“I was in the form of a peahen,”
Lizana said, “and I watched you from under hedges and from the bushy
undergrowth. I concealed myself in the thickness of the forest and watched you
while you hunted. When you retired to your quarters, I snuck into the palace
grounds and watched you through your chamber window. I watched you from the
chicken farms and the pig pens. I watched you from the courtyard. Nobody pays
any mind to a peahen, after all. It’s the males and their brilliant feathers
that turn heads.”

The prince felt as if his stomach
was twisted in knots. “You’ve been watching me all this time, while I was not
aware?” he asked in bewilderment. “My word, I’m sure I do not like that! I do not like that at all! Why didn’t you simply
show yourself to me, or go in through the palace gates and request an audience?
You are a queen! They would never turn away a queen, though they would ask her
of her business with the prince, and I’m quite certain they would not like your
answer! But oh, the wound on my back is beginning to throb! Something in the
sand bit me not long ago, and it’s quite alarming. I think it must have been a
venomous spider. Do you have a remedy for such a thing? If you do, I would be
so much obliged if you were to heal my wound.”

Lizana was not looking at him. She
was looking at the golden sands below her feet. The prince could see that her
shoulders were beginning to shake, and he thought he must have really offended
her. “Oh, my lady, please don’t be so vexed!” he cried, and gently patted the
queen’s shoulder. “I don’t wish to hurt you. I’ve only been taken aback by what
you told me. Wouldn’t you be quite taken aback if somebody told you that they
had been watching you for days and days without you knowing it? And anyway, I
have a betrothed, and we are to be married on the first day of the next spring.
She has been my betrothed for years and years, and I love her dearly and could
never give her up. You are a beautiful lady—indeed, one of the most beautiful
I’ve laid eyes on—but you really must seek another!”

Lizana looked at him, and her eyes
stung him in the heart the way the creature in the sand had stung him on the
back. “When you are ready to accept my love,” she told him, “then you may have
the remedy!”

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

A crow caws. A blue jay screeches. A sparrow sings. They are joined
by the frogs, whose clicks and calls mingle with the bubbling laughter of the
creek and the cheerful chatter of the fairies, elves, and nymphs. The sounds
blend into one harmonious song which can never be heard anywhere else but here.

A tiny brown frog dives into the creek from his spot on a shady
leafy plant. He swims until he reaches a spot on the creek bank covered in
bright green moss. Here he meets his good friend, a young water nymph. She
smiles, takes hold of him, and gently helps him up onto the shore beside her. “Thank
you, Honeysuckle,” says the frog, nodding respectfully. “You look just as
pretty and bright as you always do. How has your morning been so far?” The little
nymph blushes at the compliment and gives her grass colored hair a cheerful
toss. “My sisters and I found something beautiful on the shore by our home!”
she chirps. “They let me keep it, and now I would like to give it to you,
Reginald! You could wear it on your back like a cape or shawl, and it would
make you look so handsome!” She opens
her hand to reveal a small leaf the color of a ruby.

The frog lets out a cheery cry and takes a great leap into the air.
“Oh my! It is stunning! Do you really want me to have this? Wouldn’t you want
to keep it for yourself?”

Honeysuckle shakes her head. “No,”
she says, “I want to give it to you. Come here, so I can place it on your back
and we can see how handsome you look with it on!”

While Honeysuckle and Reginald’s
meeting goes on, in another part of the clearing a small green spider is hard
at work spinning webs. He is one of the local weavers, and today he is
especially busy because the elves will be having a ball at the end of the week;
every elf in the clearing wants a new gown or a new suit. An entire row of
trees is covered with the handiwork of this spider and the other weavers
employed by the elven tailors. The webs glisten like silver in the light of the
sun. When the morning has drawn to a close, the green spider has spun enough
and gathers up the silk to be taken to the tailors.

The four elven tailors, who run
their workshop in a patch of huckleberry greens on the bank of the creek,
inspect the crop of silk the spider has brought to them. “It is very fine,”
says one, “but is it enough?”

The other says, “It is enough, but
is it fine?”

The third says, “I think it is only
enough for one gown.”

The fourth says, “I think it is
enough for three.”

If they do not approve of this crop,
the spider will have to spend the rest of the afternoon spinning an entirely
new crop, and he was hoping to take the first few hours of the afternoon off.
He crosses his little green arms and grits his tiny teeth in anticipation of
their answer. Finally, the four tailors look at him, smile, and say, “We can
accept this. Thank you. Please start your afternoon work at three-thirty
today.”

“Thank you, sirs!” the spider says,
and scurries back to his little hole to catch up on some much needed rest.

The three squirrel brothers, Acorn,
Oak, and Nut, are playing a chasing game in the trees that tower over the
creek. Their rustling in the leaves awakens a grumpy old elf lying against a
rock for a nap. “Silly boys,” he mutters, shaking his head and retiring to his
home in an old stump. The two older boys pay him no mind and continue their
wild chase. But being so high above so much water makes the youngest brother,
Nut, too nervous to run as fast or jump as high as his brothers. Instead, he
cautiously scampers along the branches and stops to look down, causing him to
lag behind.

Oak sighs and scampers over to his
younger brother. “This isn’t a game for you, Nut,” he says, shaking his head.
“Why don’t you go find something else to play?”

Nut sighs dejectedly. “Fine,” he says,
“I will.” And he scrambles down the tree and off under a patch of wild sumac. Though
he’s disappointed not to be able to play with his brothers, he knows that his
good friend will be along soon; this spot under the sumac is his friend’s
secret place. Sure enough, along comes a pretty little red squirrel with a
white flower tied around her tail; her signature accessory. “Hi, Nut!” the
little squirrel says, nuzzling his cheek.

Sunday, September 1, 2013

Throughout the rest of that day,
Goldenrod did not play with his siblings or climb to the treetops or dance
among the leaves or visit the other finches or his spider friend. He remained
by Summer’s side, holding her close to him and kissing her and saying, “I love
you, Summer. I love you, I love you” over and over again. He slept by her side
for one final night, crying into her brown petals. The next day, when it was all
too clear that Summer was really dead, he carried her corpse to the top of the
tree and let her sail away on the wind.

Goldenrod returned home after
sending Summer off and said solemnly, “I will never love another.”

His mother took him into her arms.
“Never?” she said.

“Never,” he told her.

“But what if you were to find a
lovely elf maiden?”

“I don’t want any elf maidens.”

His mother asked no more questions
then. She held him and rocked him gently back and forth as he cried into her
feathers.

Months passed. Summer turned to
autumn, and Goldenrod’s brothers and sisters talked of marriage and their plans
to migrate. Goldenrod had recovered from his grief, but he did not speak of
courting. He wondered what would happen to him when the winter came and the
finches migrated south. He would be grown then, but without a suitor. Would he
go with his mother?

Goldenrod approached his mother in
the nest one November morning. “Mama,” he said, “where am I going to go when
winter comes?”

His mother turned to look at him,
and there were tears in her eyes. “You will be going with other elves,” she
told him.

Goldenrod’s heart began to flutter.
“Really? I’ll be going with the other elves?”

His mother nodded. “I’d been holding
off on this for as long as I could manage,” she told him wistfully, “but now
it’s time.”

“But I’ll get to see you when you
come back in the spring, right?” Goldenrod asked. “I want to help you raise my
new brothers and sisters.”

His mother took him into her arms,
and her tears finally began to pour out. “Of course,” she said, kissing the top
of his head. “I’ll come back for you as soon as I return.”

Goldenrod pressed his cheek into his
mother’s shoulder and held her as if he never would let go. “Mama, what if the
other elves don’t like me?” he asked.

“Oh, Goldenrod, who wouldn’t like you?”

So when winter arrived, Goldenrod’s
mother carried him off to a place in the forest that he’d never seen before and
had never had any desire to see; the magnolia grove where the other elves
lived. In winter, the elves didn’t take shelter in the branches of the
magnolias. Instead, they migrated to the knot holes in the bark and the roots.
The mother finch set Goldenrod down outside one of these knot holes, kissed
him, and told him that she would come right back for him the very day she
returned to the forest. “Please have a good life with the elves,” she told him.

There Goldenrod stood, outside of a
strange knot hole belonging to strange elves that he wasn’t sure would even
like him. For a while, he paced outside, wondering what to do next, when a
pretty young elf maiden strolled up behind him. “Hello,” she said cheerfully.
“Are you lost?”

Goldenrod looked at her, and beheld
another elf for the very first time. “Yes, I’m lost,” he told her. “I’m very
lost. You see, my mother is a bird—a finch—and she’s flown south for the
winter. I’ve lived with her all my life, even though I’m an elf, and now she
says I have to stay with other elves until she comes back in the spring. When
she comes back, I’ll get to help her take care of her new babies. But right
now, I need to find some elves to live with. Do you know who lives in this knot
hole?”

“Yes,” said the girl. “I live in
this knot hole. Why don’t you come inside and tell me everything from the
beginning, and I’ll see what I can do for you.”

Goldenrod was overjoyed that the
very first elf he met turned out to be so kind. He told her everything that had
happened over the summer that he was born: he told her about the mother finch
that had taken him in, and who would come back for him in the spring. He told
her about his brothers and sisters, and how they had accepted him as a bird,
and how he had believed he really had been a bird until his mother had told him
he was an elf. He told her about the flying lessons and the courting. He told
her about his spider friend. And most of all, he told her about Summer.

“I think you’re very beautiful, and
very kind,” Goldenrod told the girl. “And I think that I would like to get to
know you. Maybe I might even grow to love you. But I’m afraid that I could
never love anyone as I loved Summer.”

The girl said, “Why, don’t you know
that when next summer comes, there will be hundreds more magnolia blossoms? The
trees will be full of them! Do you think you will court another?”

Goldenrod shook his head. “I’m glad
that I will get to meet other magnolia blossoms,” he said, “and I bet they all
will be very, very lovely. But I am loyal to Summer, and I can never, ever love
another the way I loved her.” Goldenrod stayed with the kind elf
maiden, and they both reached their marriageable ages within a few months. But
they didn’t court, and they didn’t marry. Goldenrod stayed true to his word; he
never did marry. His heart belonged only to a magnolia blossom named Summer.

About Me

I'm Star Nova, and I like to tell stories. This blog used to be more topical, but then just became a place where I could easily hold my stories. I have several short stories and two big works in progress, as well as some old crap and some pending revisions OF some old crap.
I write in order to share how I see the world, from my own perspective. If you're here, you're probably here from Tumblr or Twitter. I hope you like my stories. And if you don't, I hope you at least read them before you decide that. (: